Chicago was rebuilt. The Palmer House was rebuilt immediately. Reopened in less than two years, it was built bigger—three-times bigger—and more ostentatious, more luxurious than ever: oversized over-decorated suites; a grand restaurant with a thirty-foot ceiling which spangled gilded plaster Beaux Arts garlands, scrolls and festoons, where frescos of Louis Quatorze pastorals chromed the walls, where enormous crystal chandeliers dazzled, where the best-dressed and best-mannered of society were humbly served sumptuous meals by tuxedoed negro staff. The floor of the Palmer House barbershop was tiled with silver dollars.

Rudyard Kipling would shortly visit. “They told me to go to the Palmer House,” he said. “A gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren,” he exclaimed “…. and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble, crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth.”

America is irrepressible.

(corresponding to “Southwest Wind...”)

Wind is a word we took from Norsemen when they invaded England in the ninth century.

Window is another word that we took from these Norse invaders, and which contains the word wind, and is related to it. Window is a word in two parts – wind and o – meaning literally the “wind eye.”

The prevailing winds of our ancestral Britain and our North America, or for that matter any place that is north of the 35th parallel latitude, are the southwest winds. Notoriously these are winds of our spring and our fall.

This is the western wind of Shelley’s Ode.

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being    

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead 

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,      

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 

Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou          

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed   

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,    

Each like a corpse within its grave, until 

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow      

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill  

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)    

With living hues and odours plain and hill;   

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; 

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

This is the wind that torments Lear and drives him mad:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once, That make ingrateful man!

It is not a wind that the Greek’s knew or that the Bible knows. Those winds are different, blowing differently, having different meaning. The Greek winds are unreliable. They are not the foundation of the earth as they are to us.

The Biblical winds are judgments, like everything in the Bible; they are comment on man’s relationship to God. They are the breath of God, what breath we breathe. They cast change, what change we cannot hold back. Try. Try to put up a wall to the wind. The wind will blow past it and around it and over it or will knock it down. That is God’s wind.

This wind, the Southwest wind, this is a different wind. This is the wind that defines sky. This is the wind that shapes world. This is the story of how that happens.

We are aware of consciousness in many forms, including that which is not conscious, which we call sleep, where time is forgotten. If remembered for its moments, it is the remembrance we call dreams and these seep back into that forgetfulness like water into sand and so often disappear. If we remember anything, it is remembrance of the remembrance.

There are also the simultaneities of consciousness of which we are aware, the many moving parts of ourselves—sensations, perceptions, within, without—and finally the engineer, the pilot to the motion, attending to the machinery of it, the signals demanding decision and coordination. Our actor.

The actor is our presence of mind, at least that is the billing he gets. If he is incoherent, then so am I. If out of his mind, so am I.

But what is mind? What is presence of mind? A will? Not merely. A coherent thought? Not always. Logic? Language? Not always. Although it is difficult to distinguish mind from thought in words, since thought in words is how we understand our mind. But all of us know, that words seem to drape like cloth the form of what we mean, to give appearance to what lies beneath, and thus some words with more elegance and charm than others. We like nice clothes.

But we are also naked. Music is naked thought, thought without words. The athlete thinks naked. When doing is thought. The artist thinks naked. When what is created and the creator melds, the creation is thought.

At any rate we can sense the way in which thought with words is both artificial and artful. It is not quite the real, but it is a semblance, a verisimilitude, and in itself is highly attractive, colorful, and often so beautiful it can be evocative of what that ineffable consciousness is. It can indeed seem to be so exact to the truth that we mistake for what is real.

But what if there is more than one actor here? What if I am a whole stage full of actors? What if there are not just representations of me from different times of my life, but roles I have not played, except subconsciously, or maybe roles that I have never played? What if I can be anyone I have ever met or anyone I can imagine? And what if these actors play? What if I am that drama?

(corresponding to “The Bird-Headed Woman”)

Aq!asXe’nasXena, the name of the one whom I call the Bird-headed Woman in my rendition, is an untranslated name, now untranslatable name. To what it refers was not known by Boas or his confidant, Charles Cultee.

So too, the name of the boy in the story is an untranslated, untranslatable name, Itcixia’ne, which name was given to him at the end of the story. It is suggested by Boas parenthetically that this name pertains to the strange celestial phenomenon, called sundogs or (in Greek) parhelion, which is the meteorological appearance of a frost-ringed sun, or if the sun is setting, the appearance of a sun with paired orbiculate ghosts beside it, equidistant on either side, at the span of the horizon.

... and that rare phenomenon
The iridule--when beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range….

(From Vladimir Nabokov's introduction to his 1962 novel Pale Fire)

Like frenetic hallucination, the tale is disjointed, nervous and bizarre; it lurches sickly, arousing ill feelings. We cannot tell clearly what matter this is, or when, or where it occurs. The meaning of this tale is not a social rational message; this is not a benign story of naming or custom or explanation like the others. It is raw unwholesome frightening meaning: something that cannot be named, something gnawing in the gut, something psychotic. The substance of such myths as these, as Jung and Campbell remind us, is the soul laid out at its vivisection, and we in horror, in awe, repulsed and compelled, we cannot explain what we see.

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

(From Leonard Cohen’s song, “Boogie Street”)

In which we encounter early inhabitants to Wisconsin, before the advent of logging, cities, and steamboats.

(corresponding to “Jack and Beulah”)

A creature like a rabbit, whose heart beats so rapidly that he must see details in motion which for me are a blur, must hear whispers in the brush across the span of large meadows, even when the wind is blowing, has reflexes and agility that I cannot imagine—anticipating harm before it strikes, he is gone before I can start to think. Because of this keen intensity, he must be so much more happy when he is happy, so much more enthusiastic, excited in how he feels, than we are, the dull and the plodding and the ordinary types. His leaping is breath-taking; he exults; he is heroic. The rabbit is not timid at all. Don’t mistake it for timidity, because he runs away—that is his gift and gaiety—and many are so jealous of him, they want to eat him, so they can become just like him.

Children are like this, and some who have not grown up. They go like bees about us, so fast and energetically, we think they will ignite by the heat of it, while we prefer our sofas and our snacks and our TV’s. Well, who sees life better after all? Of course, theirs is not the wisdom of the world. They get nothing for what they do. They always want more, and they shall not stop going at it. From my sofa I can see how this will end, while they will no doubt keep running until then.

In which we learn how Mr. Kite and Mr. Boyd met one another and assumed the sobriquet Even and Odd, famous for the vaudeville act under that name, once featured at the New Alsatia theatre of Chicago, and how it happened that they should eventually become wanderers of the north woods, vagabonds for venison.

(corresponding to “Topping the Bill”)

At end of the Nineteenth century, Joseph Pujol was presented to Parisians by the Moulin Rouge for his incomparable performance of farts. In French he was called Le Petomane; translated into English, the “Fartiste”.

Finely dressed in a red coat and black satin breeches with a vent for his buttock, gesturing for effect with white-gloved hands, he explained with deadpan to the audience that his emissions were completely odorless, since he irrigated his colon daily.

He opened his act with fart impressions: a new bride’s timid toot; her long-winded emission after her first night of connubial pleasures; the booming fart of a miller; and the imitation of a dress maker tearing two-yards of calico—a ten-second-rip. He did impressions of famous people and blew out candles and the gas footlights from yards away. He exploded like cannon fire and thundered like a storm. And that was just the first half of the show.

For the second half he retreated offstage and discretely inserted a rubber tube into his anus, which dangled out the back of his trousers. Using the tube he smoked two cigarettes at once, exhaling from bottom and top simultaneously. And as a grand finale he attached an ocarina to the end of the hose and played popular tunes—La Marseillaise, most notably—while beckoning the audience to sing along.

As his act matured he added a limerick about farmyard animals, which was punctuated with anal mimicry of animal sounds—pigs, chickens, cows, horses. And famously the climax of his act became his stupendous impression of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Astonishment devolved to contagion of laughter in the audience. Sometimes numbers of women passed out, unable to catch their breath because of laughter and their tight corsets, and had to be unbound in emergency. It is said his appreciative audiences included many notables, such as Sigmund Freud, whose psychiatric interpretation unfortunately is not recorded for us, and Edward the Prince of Wales who came on more than one occasion.

In which we learn about Lynch when he was a small boy, and how it came about that he becomes a traveling man, and took to selling Bibles.

The conclusion of the tale of Lynch when he was a small boy.